


The Foreign Executioner’s Son

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck, Rappaccini's Daughter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Apothecary!Sollux, Bad Parenting, Don’t judge - I have a thing for Jade rescuing Karkat, Fairy Tale Elements, Growing Up, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Poison, Retelling, The punchline is either Giant Toothed Leech or Cronus Ampora, Whatever do AUSolluxes do when there are no computers..., good parenting, touch starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 03:39:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3275291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a curious thing that what is poisonous to some is sustenance to others. </p><p>Behind The Foreigner’s walls, the rarest cultivation of his garden walks the paths and tends the plants. </p><p>Jade is not Giovanni. Karkat is not Beatrice. Sollux Captor, possibly a hypochondriac and definitely a Medician, is certainly not going to let the most entertaining of his cases, that is, patients, expire. This is not a tragedy.</p><p>(You do not need to know "Rappaccini's Daughter" to read this, it is a fusion and not a crossover, but I listed it because I lifted the basic plot directly from it. Only this is much happier!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Foreign Executioner’s Son

When you turn sixteen, your grandfather announces that it is time to return to Society, that distantly dreaded specter of Civilization. “But, Gramps,” you argue, “What do they have that we don’t here?”

You try several other arguments but his mind is set. You’re sixteen, and he’s sixty something (you’ve never gotten a clear answer on that one) and he’s had a lot more experience arguing.

You say goodbye to the cozy hunting lodge in the mountains. You say goodbye to the wind and silence and sunlight that breaks through the clouds like the intaglio print you have of light columns through a cathedral rose window. You don’t say goodbye to Bec or your faithful chestnut pony, Pumpkin. You get a good grip on Bec’s collar and Pumpkin’s halter and you brace your feet and grit your teeth and Grandpa takes one look at you and laughs.

“Never fear, Jade-my-dear. The five of us,” and he pats his own mount, Sir Dance-A-Lot, “will be sticking together. We’ll just have a bit more company in the Capital.”

And so you find yourself winding your way down the mountain to the village two days away and instead of obtaining flour or coffee or a bit of hard cheese, you are now the less-than-enthused owner of two new dresses and you are still worried about your greenhouse, because you might have taken seeds, but the plants left behind won’t make it. You snuck the peach bonsai into one of your saddlebags because it’s older than you and it just seems to be a waste to let it die after all that work.

When you set out the next day, Grandpa has sold the chickens and the nanny goat and you are riding sidesaddle. You give Gramps a glare because one doesn’t “happen” to pack your sidesaddle and you tell him in no uncertain terms that you’re keeping your regular saddle. He doesn’t object.

Sidesaddle is nothing new, you’ve been riding almost as long as you’ve been able to walk, and much of that time has been spent finding ever-novel ways to mount, dismount, jump, dangle, or climb from the saddle or Pumpkin’s steady back, or that of his predecessor, but there’s a difference between doing it for the _challenge_ and doing it because of _Expectations_. What makes it bearable is that you know you’re better at it than Gramps, who had to show you how years ago.

It is a shame that you did not previously acquire your camera kit to preserve his skirt-clad fall for posterity. Sadly, it likely would have failed anyhow. While the chemists have gotten more adept with the mixtures for developing the plates, the exposure time is still too long for anything that moves much. You have a dozen portraits each of Bec and Pumpkin and all but one are blurred. One of the Becs has three heads and his tail forms angel wings. You rather like how Pumpkin’s near foreleg is in motion in the best of his portraits.

You reach the Capital a few weeks later, making good time because you both travel light, disregarding your photography kit and the extra saddle. You see more and more airships on their routes as you get closer to the Capital. You squint up at them to try to make out the details. Airships never bothered to get near your section of the mountains, the air currents are too dangerous. They are bigger than you thought, and you wonder what their engine alloys are. Every pound counts for airships. You console yourself with the thought of bookstores in the Capital. You can only remember Fairport, which is a small city, but it had no less than _nine_ bookshops. You feel more than faintly covetous at the very thought.

Bec lopes alongside Pumpkin, grinning a doggy grin. He’s had more things to smell than usual, and, you notice as you approach the city, he’s about to get a whole lot more to stick his nose in.

*

The townhouse at the edge of the Capital is dusty, all four floors of it and its old draped furniture. You have to walk a half hour to reach the fields where Pumpkin and Sir-Dance-A-Lot are now housed with a few mellow cows. The farmer is also pretty mellow, she figures that the next time the city expands she can sell for a good profit and set up somewhere else with less people. She lets you play with the barn cat’s kittens and you tend to groom the cows too when you run out of warm bodies that appreciate a good brushing. Ten year old Pumpkin has found a second foalhood with the nanny goat’s kids. They chase each other around and the nanny goat and Sir-Dance sort of nod as they chew with a look that clearly conveys that it’s better that the younglings wear each other out before they pester them instead.

Being in the town has some advantages, namely, that there’s a lot more to explore. You start at dawn the next morning, when you breakfast on the ironwork balcony off of your room. You brought a book, an encyclopedia of watch movements purchased upon your arrival yesterday, but as you sip your coffee you get distracted from it because you can see straight over into the neighbor’s lush walled courtyard. It’s huge, larger than their living quarters, at least nine acres behind the walls. There are more trees there than some of the tiny city parks.

You can’t see anything of the neighbor’s home from your street, the wall is perhaps thirty feet high all around and there’s no door there. Their property runs past the depth of your building and the only visible door is on the far side, a giant heavy wooden fortification bound in iron. The neighboring building on their far side has no windows, but your balcony is perfectly perched to enjoy the view. Below you, there’s a ledge about seven feet from the ground, part of the original wall, flush against your building.

You don’t mean to peep, but the garden is so pretty, all the muted flower colors behind a rising mist. And through the mist someone is dancing. You lean out a bit further, not that it makes much of a difference. There’s a figure in the garden, and if they’re not dancing, than perhaps they’re fighting, though there’s nothing there that you can see. There’s a muted gleam of polished metal and their cloak is flying like they’re an exotic moth. They cross and re-cross the paths in the middle of the garden, sometimes leaping over benches or bushes, sometimes swinging up into a tree, sometimes bounding off the fountain, or a bench, or a rock to attain a higher altitude before hitting the ground and rolling.

By the time the mist burns off entirely, the figure is walking to calm their breath. You lean over the balcony and wave and let fly with a hearty and utterly unladylike, “Hello, Neighbor!” The figure turns and you catch a glimpse of red gems and orange and yellow nubs and realize that your pretty dancing neighbor is a really pretty troll boy. You only catch a glimpse because he doesn’t shout or wave back, he just turns and walks away.

*

You ask Grandpa about your neighbors, but he doesn’t know much. Supposedly the house is owned by The Foreigner, which is a pretty odd troll name as far as you can tell, because he’s been here at least as long as you’ve been alive and if you can’t be accepted or happy in a new place after that long, that’s just _sad_. You might be getting a bit congested at the thought, so you decide on a brisk walk to go visit Pumpkin and give Bec some excercise. The really odd thing though? The Foreigner has a carapacian manservant, but no one’s ever heard of him having any other servants, let alone a ward or child.

Pretty Troll Boy isn’t out in the garden the next day, or the next. You start taking your breakfast indoors and peeking out into the garden from behind the curtains. You didn’t mean to scare him off.

You find him outside a week later at dusk, and you climb the wisteria vines down the wall from the balcony when he’s faced away and you swing your legs over the broad ledge to dangle on his side, still mostly hidden in a helpful tree.

And that’s how you convince Karkat to tell you his name.

You introduce yourself as Jade, but that’s not usually what he calls you. You’re still Jade, but now you’re also Miss Menace and Lady Sticks-Her-Nose-In and Shush-You, and you know he doesn’t mean any of them, not really.

You go to salons and a few dances and meet people and start your first automaton and bring back stories and gossip for Karkat. He drinks them in like they are air to a drowning man, even as he analyses and dissects people he’s never met with what you suspect is a great deal of accuracy. Of course, sometimes he’s completely off base, and you argue over his assertions until he huffs so hard a passing butterfly gets knocked over as it flutters by your feet. The butterfly doesn’t get back up. You feel a little dizzy, and the world spins on its axis like something is dreadfully wrong.

*

It takes you a few weeks to realize that he’s never left the grounds.

You jump down into the garden now, though you’re careful not to touch most of the plants. You recognize a few as mostly harmless (the wisteria on the outside walls, the oak tree that is your convenient ladder) or tasty (alliums and herbs and wolf peaches). You recognize a lot more as potent or outright dangerous (belladonna and digitalis and wolfsbane and mournful yew and the heady smell of white oleander). Karkat absentmindedly browses as he trims and tidies. You are unfamiliar with trolls, but a lot of what he eats is toxic to humans. And dogs. And horses.

The fountain is composed of a trio of horses. A trio of rampant pissing stallions, actually. It’s carved well, it’s just, you don’t know why anyone would _want_ to feature that in their (very carefully tended) garden. There are few things more humorously awkward than a male horse peeing, and they certainly don’t do it on their hind legs. Still, it’s a funny change from all the peeing cherubs that the rest of the elite and moneyed seem to have. Isn’t it odd that muscular human-skulled flying snakes and fat human boy children with wings are both called _cherubs_?

Lady Lalonde, who runs the Chemistry circle, has a small fountain topped by a stone grub. The fountain spouts downward in two crisp arcs from its little horns so that it looks like the stone grub has crystalline arching horns. You’ve seen diagrams and photos, but it’s the only three dimensional representation of a troll grub you’ve seen, and you certainly haven’t seen any live ones. You wonder if troll grubs come about like human babies or if it’s entirely different. Carapacians are likewise closemouthed and you’ve been unable to find any scientific literature on comparative biology. You’ll have to ask Rose. The booksellers you’ve found so far, only six as of yet, don’t seem to be entirely comfortable with your interests.

Karkat still won’t let you close enough to touch. You’ve tried, a few times, but he’s so graceful he just sways away, or once, leaped straight into a tree, then peered down peevishly, like a treed cat.

You don’t recognize half of what lies within the garden. You don’t know Karkat half as well as you wish you did, even though you’ve argued philosophy and he’s astounded you with strange botany facts and you’ve confessed exactly how many times your tiny automaton cricket has shivered itself apart or hurled itself into a wall until that is how he greets you, with a pretended disinterest in the inquiry, “How did it destroy itself _this_ time?” Pretended because you can almost see his ears prick and he’s looking at you from the sides of his eyes, and he really is just waiting to find out how to tease you about it this time.  You wonder if his patron knows his moods as well as you know them.

The paths in the garden are straight and wide and sharply defined, but there are also stepping stones through the beds of plants and Karkat knows each one so well he never has to look. There are mosses and low creeping plants that surround the stones so that it’s like he’s walking over the plants without touching them, an unlit psionic, a Jesus-of-the-Garden. You probably shouldn’t joke about such things, though you’ve heard worse. The great leaps of technology seem to be erasing the mysteries, but there are still those who would like to besmirch a young woman’s name for no greater purpose than gossip.

The gossips would do better to twitter about the time you’ve spent alone with Karkat. You have been sheltered all your life. You can shoot, and skin a rabbit, and sew your own shirts, or wounds, and cook over a campfire or over a stove. You can develop your own plates and disassemble, clean, and reassemble your watch. You can sketch all the pieces without looking. But never before have you spent much time in Society. Never before have you become so close to anyone but Grandpa and Bec and Pumpkin. You’ve never touched Karkat and you think that your heart would break if something happened to him, or if you were separated.

You feel a bit like the plant in one of your experiments.  The growing season on the mountain was short, but the two of you had the greenhouse and you liked to experiment. You grew plants under different colors of glass or prepared seeds differently and compared the results. You cross-pollinated flowers and grew new kinds. You also once kept a bean plant in the light and one in the dark to track the changes, and the dark one grew, but it was ghostly pale. You moved the pale spindly plant into the light and shortly thereafter, it died. You are the pale plant in the light of other people’s regard for the first time, and you stiffen your spine so that you stand and sit straight, but you are unable to stiffen your heart.

You socialize among your class as necessary and try to gravitate toward those who at least continue to educate themselves and can offer conversation and not just gossip. Rose is a lady, but she’s also a scholar. Likewise her mother, the Lady Lalonde, is known for her work in chemistry. Perhaps it is the mysteries fighting erasure that gossips preserve the title _alchemist_ so well. Of course, alchemist, for a woman, is just another way of calling her a witch. Karkat’s right, people _are_ kind of piles of dung.

He’s a voracious reader and you’ve given him almost every book you’ve finished, even though you know from the way he holds them that you’ll never get them back. It’s not like books are cheap, you could sell or trade them if you didn’t want to keep them, but there’s something infinitely more appealing, more satisfying to see the hunger in him, briefly satiated.

You want to feed his mind until he trusts you and maybe lets you hug him. You know enough about trolls to know that’s really forward of you, but who else does he have? Is it manipulative to want him to be happy?

*

You are the garden-dwelling troll contemplating knocking the phalluses off a trio of stone stallions. You’re mad, mad at yourself, mad at your guardian, mad at the circumstances. You compromise and push over a particularly ugly single statue of a flexing musclebeast onto the flagstones and leave the fountain plumbing intact. It doesn’t make you feel better. The frogs in the fountain would doubtlessly be relieved if only they knew how close they came to the end of their world as they knew it.

You look up at the windows of the neighboring townhouse, empty for as long as you can remember until three months ago when Jade and her grandfather the Duke Harley moved in. The window on her bedroom is open and the curtain is fluttering in the wind. You wish you could climb the wall and visit her, but she’s asleep and that’s really creepy. Also, you’ve never left the confines of your own house and garden.

When you were eight years old and impatient to see all the world that you read about in your books, you had asked your guardian, The Foreigner. You had been so excited, so determined, you had actually run up to him and reached out. He had flinched and jerked back, and you had had to force yourself to stop. He has never touched you.

No one touches you, there is no one here but the two of you, and Jack. Jack is a carapacian, and won’t touch you, is disgusted when you try, but he let you put a hand on his arm once, when you were very young and very sick, and you think that it was real and not a dream. Jack has a smudge of gray just so on his otherwise glossy shell, and you think that that must be where you touched him, but perhaps the smudge was always there and the dream was just a phantasm of your fevered mind. You’re a troll, your people are supposed to be tough. How can you miss something you can’t remember?

You’ve never asked The Foreigner again, but he _knows_ somehow when you think of running, repeats the same thing he’s always said.

“The world outside these walls is dangerous. Dangerous to everyone, but especially you. You must not leave. You will never be able to be _safe_ anywhere else.”

And he brings you an extra book or botany etching or new seeds as if in apology.

*

You’re mad when you find out. Mad at Karkat, mad at The Foreigner, mad at Jack, mad at yourself. Mostly, you’re just mad. You lift a pot of herbs in a terracotta pot over a front balcony, check for pedestrians, then let it drop. The shatter satisfies something inside you, even as your eyes are too blurry to make out the shards.

You haven’t seen Karkat in two days. You haven’t seen Karkat since he misjudged a flip and scraped his knee and you tried to wash the red off and wrap it for him and he pulled back like you were poison. Except you weren’t poison, he was, he is, he is trapped by some terrible experiment of The Foreigner’s.

You think of the garden and it is not only his prison, but the setting for The Foreigner’s rarest cultivation, the rarest specimen in the city or the continent or the _world_. There are no other redblooded trolls. There is no one else who has survived what Karkat has. There is no one in the world that can hug Karkat and not suffer for it. While you will get older and maybe get married and maybe have children, Karkat will never lie with anyone. They would die of it.

You think of him, explaining, head turned from you, “I’m poisonous, Jade. You can’t touch me. You shouldn’t even get this close, in case I sneeze or exhale too hard or we accidentally touch. It’s lucky you’re not a troll, or you would already be sick with even this proximity. A seadweller would be _dead_.”

He cried, and your stupid pretty troll boy is one of those stupid pretty people that don’t even look stupid when they do it, not like you with your great ugly sobs and snot and red nose. His tears were tinted just slightly red, and as they tracked their way down his smooth gray cheeks you thought of that marble statue in Rome that weeps blood. You thought of Pygmalion and you thought of The Foreigner, and you don’t know why anyone would do what The Foreigner did, or what Jack did in letting it happen. It is one thing to bring life to stone. It is entirely something else to bring this level of enforced solitude and exile to a living creature. You could not have done this to Bec or Pumpkin. How could he do this to a _child_?

*

You scour the city for someone who might know more about Karkat’s condition and have the sympathy to help. You’d pay, of course, but you are desperately sure that if you ask the wrong person, it will be worse than no help at all. What if someone decides that Karkat is too dangerous to live? A condition so dangerous that an aristocratic and volatile seatroll could die merely passing within the cloud of his exhale… you wonder if The Foreigner has been cultivating a tool for assassinations, and you hate him even more. Karkat is light on his feet, swift and beautiful. He could be deadly with his sickles, but that’s a choice. This is just sick.

In a tiny shop at the bottom of a tenement building a maroon-eyed fortuneteller charges you two coppers to ask any question you like, and she’ll give you an answer if she has one. She specifies that the coppers have to be bright and shiny, and fortunately, you have a few that are. It’s a steal if she can really do it, and no great loss if she can’t. She smiles at you and she extends a few fingers for Bec to sniff. 

You like her smile and her horns are super curly just like her hair. And you don’t feel like you need to flash your knife to show you’re not easy prey, like you have already several times today.  So you sit yourself down and she closes and locks the door and you tell her you have a friend who needs medical or scientific help, but that he’s housebound and his condition is kind of strange and maybe someone knows what to do but you don’t know where to start?

“Hmm, is it contagious?”

You make her pinky swear to keep this confidential before you continue. Her mouth curves a bit, but her eyes are serious when she agrees.

“It’s dangerous to other people to be close, but I don’t think that they would become harmful to others the way he is. They would just get sick or die then and there.”

“Does it have the same effect on all species?”

“It’s most dangerous to trolls but humans and carapacians are affected too. Insects as well. I don’t know about other animals.” You don’t tell her that it’s most dangerous to seatrolls.

“Hmm, let me consult.” She pulls out a talking board and hums a bit, watches the tiny wheeled pendulum skitter, and takes notes as it goes.

The planchette skitters some more and finally sits up with a soft chime. Aradia smiles at you.

“Most intriguing. The spirits indicate that it is quite important that I assist you. Either that, or they are bored and desire entertainment.” She still sounds cheerful, and you hope that she can help.

She stands up. “Come along, it seems that I need to introduce you to two people. Sollux is in the next neighborhood, but Kanaya is across the city. If we go now, we should be able to catch them both and both get home before it gets too dark.” She packs a small bag, wraps herself in a shawl and you follow her out. Bec sneezes as you exit. The street smells like horse droppings and a hint of exhaust. You hadn’t noticed when you entered, but her shop smells _clean_ , like the very air did not dare pollute her territory while carrying such earthy odors.

The next neighborhood is also full of shops and residences, though moderately nicer ones. Aradia leads you up a set of narrow steps marked at the street level with a sign carved and painted to show two fairies, one each winged in blue and red, captive in a large glass jar, no business name. The red fairy is sticking its tongue out. The blue one is upside down with its feet in the air. They’re both naked, with a total of four erect middle fingers and two erect sets of boy bits. The sign states “by appointment only”. The fairies are lewd and sort of cute, but you’re getting a mixed message here. You’re pretty sure you don’t have an appointment, even if you did come with a psychic. You tell Bec to sit-and-stay and he lies down under the sign with a gusty sigh as you climb the stairs after Aradia.

Sollux is a tall, thin, slightly stooped apothecary, and, fortunately for you, seems fond of Aradia. You suspect that this is very fortunate as he doesn’t seem terribly fond of people in general. You get a little frown when you enter. Aradia gets a nod.

He doesn’t stop what he’s doing, sorting some type of seed and wrapping lots in twists of paper. His fingers are long and spindly, with just the forefinger and thumb talons sharpened to points and the rest filed. He looks back down as he finishes a wrap and sets it aside.

You get a bigger frown when Aradia tells him to close up, you all need to get to Kanaya’s. Sollux protests with a hunch of his shoulders and you think it had more to do with going out among other people than crossing the city during daylight. Some trolls aren’t terribly fond of the brighter hours, seadwellers and indigos, and some blues and teals, mostly, but the trait can turn up throughout the spectrum. He finishes the rest of the wraps and puts everything away before he locks up and leaves with you. When he exits his building, he looks at Bec, looks at you, and his nose sort of squinches like he might sneeze. Aradia elbows him and he frowns instead. Bec looks at you and promptly ignores Sollux.

The four of you troop across the city and you don’t have any trouble at all this time. You’re not sure if this is because there are more of you now or because both of your companions are trailing their bags behind them like Bec is trailing behind you. It’s foolish to meddle with a psionic, let alone two. Then again, people can be idiots.

The Maryam sisters are both healers and they live and work out of a narrow building only a few neighborhoods from you. Both of them are at home when you call and now you are surrounded by four strangers and you hope that you’re not about to hurt Karkat by spilling his secret, but he needs help, and you can’t imagine Aradia purposefully hurting him. Kanaya and Porrim likewise seem kind, if less effusively enthusiastic, and Sollux hasn’t been _unkind_. And Porrim scratched Bec in all his favorite places without him having to escalate from Puppy Eyes to Shiver Dance, so clearly she is a Person of Impeccable Character.

They promise confidentiality and you tell your abbreviated story again. They start to ask you questions.

Sollux asks you what kind of “freak of nature” your friend is. You stare at him for a moment, so mad you can’t speak, and Aradia elbows him as you clench your fists.

Kanaya interrupts. “What Mr. Captor _means_ is that bloodcaste, astrological sign, patron aspect, and, of course, individual gifts lead to a vastly diverse spectrum of reactions to certain infectious agents, or their remedy.”

“Um. Before we go further, I need you to promise that you won’t hurt him.” They know enough to know that your friend is a warmblood male troll and that he’s potentially dangerous to public health but a complete shut-in. Each thing you tell them is one more clue to his identity. And there’s one thing that is positively unique and unmistakable. You’re at the cusp of either real help or terrible folly.

Kanaya speaks when you’ve been silent for a moment.

“It is in a healer’s oath to do no harm. Unless someone is dying, and it is meant to ease their way, or one is threatened, or defending another, we do not engage in _harm_. The very idea is loathsome. My sister and I have both taken such oaths, and Mr. Captor, as well.”

You look at Mr. Crankypants. He crosses his arms and glares back.

“I graduated from the Medicians University. I took the Oath. But I fucking hate getting blood and snot and worse on me or having to be soft and kind about telling someone ‘looks like you’ve got months to live, guess you shouldn’t have fucked so many unfortunate whores, but if it makes you feel better your matesprit/spouse/fiancé will sure remember you when they curse you and die of the same thing.’

“Most of my clientele are other healers. I don’t mind mixing up the odd love philter or slurry enhancer but _like hell_ do I want to exhaust myself pretending to care about the mundane drama of hypochondriacs and idiots dealing with the fallout of bad decisions.

“Also, **_children are all disease agents_**. They give me the frigging willies. And pregnant people, likewise, ye gods.”

“One might suspect, Mr. Captor, that you have more than a touch of the hypochondriac yourself.” Porrim is smirking as she needles him.

“This isn’t analyze ‘Mr. Captor’ day, can we get to the meat of the issue? The patient?”

You don’t want to antagonize him, but you really need to be sure he’ll be on Karkat’s side. “Do you really want to be here?”

“Do you want my help or not?”

“I don’t _know_! I don’t know what help we need or if someone might change their mind and decide that someone dangerous only within a vicinity, but not sick, someone who doesn’t intend any harm, needs to culled for the greater good. Do you promise to help if you can and not say anything to anyone else either way?”

“I understand confidentiality. And I took the Oath.” He has his arms crossed and he’s glaring at you again. You glare back, because he’s being kind of a jerk if he doesn’t understand your position.

Kanaya interrupts and this time she sounds both reassuring and a bit exasperated.

“You have stated that your friend’s condition is quite unique. Mr. Captor is known throughout the continent, in certain circles, for his facility with the medical properties of plants and fungi, not only their effects, but also their interactions, and furthermore, how the patient’s very physique changes their effect. It is exceedingly rare for someone to be able to identify such a sheer range of both the living and dried specimens with such accuracy. You will not find another of his talent within the city, nor in several hundred miles. You would not have known of course, as Mr. Captor seldom interacts directly with the public whom his talents assist. However, Ms. Megido brought you to all of us, so clearly there is need for our combined expertise. Mr. Captor’s memory is eidetic, his manner contrary, and no one has ever so much as suggested that his ethics were less than professional.”

You inhale, and let go of balled up skirt in your fists. You look up.

“I don’t know his sign, or his aspects, but he’s red. Human red. Not rust. Red.”

Mr. Cranky’s mouth is dropped open and you can see he’s got a double set of canines. His tongue is forked too, and it kind of makes him much more adorkable. Porrim’s already snapped her mouth back shut, and Kanaya’s eyes are wide open and her mouth firmly shut, like even in the extremities of shock she’s still as dainty and elegant as Rose.

Aradia is bouncing on her toes. She punches a fist in the air and whoops. You would be offended but she seems so _happy_. You take this to mean she’s the best source of _why_.

“Aradia? This means something to you. What is it?”

You don’t expect it when she swings in close, grabs you by the shoulders and plops a big kiss on your cheek. You freeze and she gets the other cheek. Most trolls are not much for casual contact and you have no idea what that was about.

“He Has Returned!” She exclaims with joy, and maybe a little awe. You can hear the capitals.

Crankypants looks pissed now, and Aradia dashes over to him and hauls him down to deposit a double cheek kiss on him too. It makes him splay his arms out wide in surprise, like a giant stork trying to balance itself. He settles and crosses his arms yet again when she lets him go. You realize that they must be quite a bit more than acquaintances as you can’t imagine him letting anyone else touch him.

Aradia is still bouncing in place when the Maryam sisters explain The Sufferer. You know some of it, The Sufferer is a troll saint to Christians and a troll prophet to Muslims, and a Seer to some of the carapacians in both the main monotheistic and polytheistic religions, and a general headache to the racist extremists who like to fear monger over how woowoo scary trolls are. He lived, and died, about twelve hundred years ago, about AD 500-550, or thereabouts. You just didn’t realize that He was literally red-blooded, that it wasn’t some sort of integration metaphor, a bridge with the humans and carapacians, their analogue to human Jesus and the carapacian god/Seer known as The Listener of the Equal Measures.

The Maryams are themselves descendants of The Sufferer’s mother, though she herself was not necessarily related to him by birth. They tell you that the jade caste is often more open to innovation so long as it supports healing and the protection of children. Their enclave spared them to attend Medicians University, but having graduated and started practicing, they found there was just as much need in the city as in their rural roots. Porrim’s face is solemn as she assures you that, even with his eyes filled in, they cannot but regard a troll raised in such captivity as a child, that they will protect him as such until he can protect himself or they go their separate ways. It’s a kind thing to tell you and it makes you feel better.

You know yourself, from the brief writings you can find in languages you can read, that jades are rarely prone to the berserker state that plagues the colder bloods, either in its potential presence or in the gossip and speculation about it. They’re all very eager to meet Karkat now, and you hope that this wasn’t a mistake. Once they know where he lives, he’ll have nowhere to hide.

You walk back home with your four experts and tell Grandpa you have guests for the night. Once again you appreciate how awesome Grandpa is, because he doesn’t even blink, he just heads to the icebox to turn dinner for two into a low-key browsing dinner party for six. From your more recreational reading, a longstanding attempt to understand general human interaction, having lost out on observing larger groups, it would not have been odd for him to have a case of vapors instead. Unless that only applies to women in tight corsets? You’re not always sure about fashion and its intersection with human behavior and politics. You mostly just try to be sure all your dresses are comfortable and have pockets.

Aradia has a healthy appetite, and seems to find Grandpa’s jokes funny. Sollux picks at the food and doesn’t touch the wine. Porrim swipes his glass once she’s finished most of her plate and Kanaya sits like she’s going to be graded on posture. It’s a lot less uncomfortable than it could be. You wonder if this is almost like what it would have been like to grow up with friends.

The five of you lay out camping bedding in the parlor attached to the balcony next to your own and you stay up later than you intended because Aradia is full of stories about The Sufferer, aided, you suspect, by some of the spirits who attend her. Eventually, you all get some sleep.

As the sky starts to lighten, you take shifts watching the house next door until Porrim confirms that both The Foreigner and Jack the carapacian have passed on your street. You charge to the balcony to check yourself and are up and over and scrambling down before any of them have their packs ready.

Technically you had discussed where Karkat might go if he ever left, but it was in very general terms and you’re pretty sure he was being sarcastic when he threw his hands up and told you to ‘go ahead and trumpet it from the towers and tell everyone to come visit for a free fatal handshake’. He also called you something unpleasant and you know enough about troll anatomy to know that he was telling you to lick his nether muffin.

You pin Karkat in place by virtue of backing him into the one corner with nothing to jump up on. He doesn’t dare push past you and you take merciless advantage while Aradia floats herself, the sisters, and three valises down the wall. Sollux floats himself, though you can’t imagine how when he’s weighed down with such a frown.

Karkat puts up a fuss, of course, because it’s Karkat and he can’t just shut up and say, “Thank you, Jade, I sure was worried.” Instead he calls you a few new things, “unworthy to be a maggot-infested chunk of nightsoil in my gods-be-damned garden”, “senseless as a concussed starling about to drown in fake hoofbeast piss”, etc. It all comes down to he’s scared. You want to hug him and tell him it will be alright. This circles back to the actual problem.

Aradia wins Karkat over by asking him if he tends to the garden. He grudgingly affirms it and then he’s lost because she steamrolls him like a road prep crew with one of the fancy new combustion engine rollers. Karkat is smart, but he’s not exactly used to company. Aradia introduces everyone and waves a hand behind her to assure everyone that The Spirits of The Waking Dead are keeping watch and also smelling the flowers. You aren’t sure if that’s a joke.

Sollux is stalking the garden a bit like you survey a bookshop, very covetously. He reluctantly returns to the corner and asks Karkat what his malfunction is. The boys bicker completely off topic until Kanaya asks them if the rest of you should adjourn until they complete their pitch solicitations, and reminds Sollux that he’s something of a hypochondriac and Karkat is quite poisonous. Sollux looks like he swallowed a live frog and sneers so hard his fangs pop out over his lower lip.

Karkat outright cackles until he coughs, politely, into his sleeve so you’re in no danger from sputum, however minute the quantity. Sollux pins him to the wall with his psionics, Aradia pats Sollux on the shoulder, he flushes bright yellow, Karkat laughs and coughs again, and Kanaya rolls her eyes and asks if perhaps we shouldn’t all sit down somewhere and talk like “reasonable sentients or some facsimile of such”. Porrim is still walking along the main garden paths, clearly she’s the smartest of all of you.

You’re not sure if anyone else noticed that Karkat’s eyes fluttered shut when he was pinned. If no one can touch him, that must be the closest he’s ever come to a hug. You open your own eyes wide to contain the sudden watering.

Sollux interrogates Karkat quite thoroughly, everything from his schedule, to his diet, to his reactions to the plants in the garden, to his interactions with The Foreigner and Jack and if he can remember any earlier history of all of the above. The boys actually calm down once Sollux stalks off to frown at the flowers and question Karkat about each. Porrim walks with them, and, after an _almost_ imperceptible wobble, stays even further from Karkat than Sollux does.

Sollux snips bits of the plants off with psionics and wraps them individually in waxed paper, also without touching them, and the little packets float in a steady stream back to his valise. You’re not sure if he’s taking samples or just using this as an opportunity to get free stuff. If you’re reading him right, the answer is yes.

You stay with Kanaya and Aradia and the cheerful psychic relays her own patter of who among her flock died of what, with an emphasis on plant-based poisons. Sollux and Karkat are six feet apart and waving their arms at each other when Aradia stands up.

“Jack is returning. It is time for us to take our leave, for now.” Somehow her voice carries. For a moment, because he is terrible at hiding his emotions, you can see Karkat’s face has fallen.

“We’ll be back!” You whisper-shout this and Karkat frowns his secretly-pleased frown.

You all nip back up the wall like thieves in the night. Do-gooder medical thieves in the broad daylight.

*

It takes weeks of surreptitious meetings, but at the end of it, Karkat’s “cure” is relatively simple. Messy. Painful. Rigorously scheduled and monitored. But (conceptually) simple.

Sollux had a completed list of the poisonous plants that contributed to Karkat’s condition, dosages, frequency, method of introduction, a spreading web of their effects and interactions. It was super complicated, because some of the plants and fungi were contact poisons, some of them had to be consumed, and dose and interactions make all the difference for all of them.

Basically, The Foreigner, or _The Executioner_ , as Aradia calls him, had been grazing grubbaby Karkat across a field of poisonous plants for as long as he had him, and some of his tolerance for them was innate and some of it was gradual. You still don’t know how The Foreigner came into possession of tiny grubbaby possibly-The-Sufferer’s-Descendent Karkat, but you imagine him as a grumpy and adorable red caterpillar, and doodle him into the edges of your cricket-diagrams. You doodle monstrously complicated and improbable machines to stomp all over The Foreigner. These take their own sheets of paper, and feature wheels with six shoes on them, like grubbaby Karkat is returning his abuse.

The process of weaning Karkat off of the plants takes _months_ , and it’s painful to watch and worse to endure. Sollux’s finicky nature proves its worth dozens of times over. His exhaustive schedule inches Karkat toward freedom, through sweats and fevers and fainting-that-shall-never-be-acknowledged.

In the end, Karkat is not dead, and he can touch you, you can touch him, and neither of you are the worse for it.

The first time it happens two months and three weeks into the implementation of Sollux’s here-goes-whatever-detox-plan, you touch hands and you’re laughing, and he’s crying and smiling, his stupid pretty face just dripping with the traces of his tears. You have to wash really well when you get home, because your hand has a rash on it in shape of his fingers clenched over and between your own, but you don’t feel the least bit faint, just ecstatic. The rash vanishes in a few hours.

There’s a few oops along the way, but no one dies. Aradia can touch him safely next, and then Sollux, who’s not much for touching but has been more or less engaging in a long-distance verbal pitch relationship with your pretty troll boy. Well, the _long_ -distance part isn’t that long, but the distance is everything. They sort of dictate unwritten letters of dislike in cordially menacing tones, like pen-pals, but with more practicing of their sneers. Karkat kinks his nose up more creatively, but Sollux has scarier teeth, so it’s sort of a draw.

Three months into the detox, Karkat leaves a note for his guardian ( _I’m off to see a bit of the world, don’t hold dinner.)_ and scales up the wall with the rest of you. The note is almost hilariously passive-aggressive and if The Foreigner hadn’t treated him so ill, it would be cruel. He hasn’t been eating anything at his residence anyhow, only Sollux’s strictly prescribed balanced diet of just-so-much-toxic-and-no-more, so there’s an added element of humor to it.

Grandpa doesn’t even blink when you ensconce your not-quite-so-pretty-as-usual troll boy in your room on the extra bed. You’ve brought home fox kits and baby birds and once a bear cub that got hustled out very quickly, but never a _person_.

Karkat is meticulous about not leaving traces of potential contamination behind, though once Sollux starts him on daily charcoal tabs and a pint of milk and twice as much water, sometimes he’s so weak that it’s all he can do to pull himself over to vomit in the pan by his bed.

He names the commode in your water closet. Loadgaper the Munificent, he pronounces, is his Very Best Friend. Except that when he falls asleep on LtM, it’s _Jade_ that muscles his ungrateful muscular ass back into bed and washes out his vomit basin. _You’re welcome. **Ass**._

Then it’s Jade that goes and washes up again because his sweat is still mildly irritating. The vomit-comet phase lasts _three weeks_ and he’s irritable, and you’re irritable, and Bec chooses of his own accord to stay with Grandpa. You can’t get much food into him that doesn’t come back out and you can see the weight dropping off of him and it _worries_ you.

Sollux tells you not to get your tits in a twist. You punch him in the shoulder and then you sob, because you can’t help it, you’re trying and _what if it’s not enough_ and Karkat’s asleep and Sollux is scarcely going to tell him that you broke down over this, and it’s _awkward_ and Kanaya would probably be sympathetic, and Aradia would distract you, and Porrim would tell you to buck up and take Bec for a walk to clear your head, and Sollux just looks _panicked_.

His hands sort of wave in the air like he doesn’t know what to do and you laugh as you cry and you just sort of collapse on the couch and he sort of waves his hands around like he might pull a rabbit from a hat but he’s not sure if either will make you sob again so he _doesn’t dare_.

You pick yourself up and you blow your nose and you wash your face and then you tell Mr. Captor, in no uncertain terms, that he’s going to tell you exactly what to expect or you will have Words, and by Words you mean _you will shove your shotgun up his rear and go hunting for his sense of propriety_. This at least makes him laugh and things get easier after that.

It’s never explicitly stated, but as he tells you what Karkat might be able to keep down, you make huge batches of bland chicken-and-carrot soup and if he comes by every day, well, it would be discourteous to _not_ feed him, so by default you learn to cook things that _Sollux_ can keep down.

He never gets to be less than lean but the sunken places under his cheekbones fill in a bit. Aradia tells you that his sense of smell is so acute that he doesn’t much care for most food and he’s not very interested in feeding himself. She also stops in regularly to have a bowl with the rest of you and brings a crusty bread every time that Karkat seems to enjoy shredding, grinding it one mouthful at a time with a steady workmanlike demeanor that belays how much enjoyment he gets out of mutilating it.

You never really thought of yourself as a patient or impatient person, but you know that you’ve been more patient then you’ve ever been before when you take care of Karkat. You greatly look forward to the time when you can cuddle him without checking all surfaces before and after for potential contamination. As it is you change his sheets daily or more as he sweats out a lifetime of poisons. You are meticulous about wearing gloves when dealing with anything stronger than his sweat. The laundry piles up faster than you can believe.

You finish your cricket, and it not only hops and flips, it also chirps, which makes Karkat smile, and sometimes, when he’s not utterly drained, he chirps back. You pull out the sketches you’ve been working on for your next projects, and let Karkat pick one. When you finish, the little copper and brass crab scuttles sideways, both ways, and clicks its claws when it turns. You start a little pony with Pumpkin’s sweet face and you immerse yourself in figuring out how to give it three distinct gaits.

Every few days you bully Sollux into doing the wash. He gripes every time but you can’t get enough of watching the sheets float through the air and then scrub themselves. With enough effusive praise, the grumble dies down to general-levels-of-Sollux.  You’ve started to grow fond of him, something which seems to alarm him greatly. This feeds back into your fondness for him. He’s like a grouchy living library. He’s such a doof.

You wonder if you could automate washing for non-psionics? You’re going to need a bigger tub for that… and better drainage for the experimentation phase…

Soon Sollux can flick Karkat with a claw when your invalid’s being grouchy and can hand him a vial to spit into instead of floating it over. He can stand within arm’s reach and not feel faint in the space of Karkat’s exhalations. Of course, Sollux had to refer to it as Karkat’s deadly breath weapon, like he was an elusive cavern wyrm, but you think that that actually made Karkat feel better about it, like Sollux is affording him the proper respect for his woowoo scary trollhood. They’re weird like that.

Karkat still can’t kiss anyone, or participate in other manners of body fluid exchanges, as Kanaya politely words it, and according to Sollux, he’d pretty much annihilate a seadweller if he bled on them, but there’s progress. Even in the midst of the worst of the side-effects, he seems to perk up when Sollux presents himself as a target or offender. Sollux doesn’t seem to mind that his potential kismesis isn’t exactly up for willie-waltzing. You’re not sure if they’re weird because they’re trolls or because they’re boys. You think it might be the latter.

Kanaya and Porrim can’t touch Karkat safety until he’s well into his detoxification, but they’re both practical sorts and visit often enough that he gets the benefit of their company and advice without the drawbacks of living with them. They are both eerily perfect and you bet they file their toenails in the kitchen and leave dirty dishes all over their rooms, it’s the only thing you can think of to explain their preternatural self-possession. They treat Karkat kindly, but without response to his more crude verbal offenses, and he in return mostly stops poking at them. He may, sometimes, when he doesn’t think anyone is looking, smile back. They have tamed your feral guest! Now if only they could tame his unruly belly to accept more foods without threatening to revolt.

Bec, the total traitor, sits at Porrim’s feet and sheds on her skirts while she sneaks him shreds of chicken and lumps of carrot. Bec has never eaten so well as he has since you’ve started endless-rounds-of-chicken-soup. You and Grandpa are getting pretty tired of it, so you start a second stewpot for anything-but-chicken-carrot-soup. Sollux brings you dried chilies in a clever locked twist of wax paper and you and Grandpa spend an evening sweating and feeling like you have your own breath weapons. Karkat laughs.

Aradia visits Karkat too, usually just in time for a meal, and she’s always good company. You are pretty sure that she doesn’t file her toenails in the kitchen because going everywhere with a crowd of spirits is probably sufficiently creepy to safely offset her cheer. At least the spirits don’t seem interested in your soup. You spend enough time in the kitchen as it is and you really don’t want to have to hire someone to help. Grandpa and you are considered weird enough as it is, and you don’t want to think how bad the gossip would get if someone else actually knew what was going on.

Sollux checks in every day, and on better days this results in long arguments with Karkat. On bad days, Sollux floats Karkat to the washroom and heats the water with his psionics, then dunks Karkat and runs him through a wash cycle. On really bad days, Karkat doesn’t fuss about it, and Sollux is extra gentle. You think you’ve figured Sollux out. He’s all bitter lemon coating and a sweet mousse interior.

Slowly the good days outnumber the bad, and Sollux’s exhaustive continuous testing of Karkat’s spit, urine, and blood support both that he’s becoming less toxic, and that his organs are still functioning properly. As the good days outnumber the bad, Karkat’s reactions to the continuous requests for testing materials tend to get more obnoxious and crude.

He asks Sollux if he’s going after his slurry next, and Sollux pulls out this absolutely _giant_ toothed leech from his valise and cheerfully asks if he’s volunteering. The leech thrashes, Karkat goes dead pale, you didn’t know trolls could _do_ that, and he learns an important lesson regarding the impossibility of squicking an apothecary, even one who thinks of people as disease vectors and thinks of cities as epidemic distribution centers. You have never seen Sollux so _cheerful_.

When Karkat’s feeling better, you’re going to drag him to Sollux’s shop and he can see what a dead plant library looks like. Sollux has loads of other dead things in jars. Some of them are very big and toothy, like the leech is just a baby. Some of them have gears. You’re pretty sure that they’re not storage, they’re like Sollux’s version of art. You also have no clue what he really uses a giant toothed leech for. Does he just carry it around in the hope someone gives him the proper lead up to a giant-toothed-leech punchline?

You start to work on a toothed leaf grinder that can shred herbs. Not that Sollux needs the help when his psionics are so precise he can mix and work his own _glassware_ , you are _so envious_ , that is _so useful_ , but you make it in the shape of the giant leech and add some clockwork to make it wiggle across a flat surface when the secondary key is wound.

The first time you show it to Karkat, he’s ambulatory and eating well, but still tires easily. He’s resting on his bed, attempting to read _Botany of the New World_ , not really completely awake and you wind the grinding leech and set it half under a handkerchief on the floor and his eyes slowly focus on the movement until it pops out and he screeches and sort of levitates and you knew he had his sickles but you don’t know how he got them out so fast. It is a Mystery. He calls you things you can’t quite remember, they were way too long, but they were rude and funny and he didn’t address you by name for _two days_. Holy heck, you love this boy with his curious mind and his flaming temper, you are going to hug him _so hard_ when it will no longer make you break out in hives.

Grandpa thinks Karkat’s foul mouth is hilarious. Karkat doesn’t seem to know how to react to being called “feisty”, but he shuts up and lets Grandpa read him bedtime stories, which is totally not fair, because Grandpa does all the voices and since you learned to read faster than he reads aloud, you’ve been wasteful of the opportunity. So you invite yourself along.

Grandpa knows what’s going on, it’s not fair to hide the next door neighbor’s runaway ward in his house without telling him, but he never hesitates when he ruffles Karkat’s hair and wishes him sweet dreams, even if he is careful to wash after. You’re glad that Karkat doesn’t know how his eyelids droop and he just instantly looks all kinds of sleepy, because if he knew he would probably mess it up. As it is, he usually sleeps pretty soundly, at least now that Grandpa’s reading to him. You make a note to pet his hair more often, and make another note to keep only mental notes on your experiment regarding his reaction to different durations and patterns. You are so going to tweak his nubby little horns.

You still go out to social occasions, it’s the best way to camouflage what’s going on at home and keep an ear out for gossip that might relate to The Foreigner. You introduce Rose to the Maryam sisters and Kanaya and she get along like a matched set of carriage horses, cheerful and arch and liable to drag everyone off to places unknown.

Through Kanaya, Sollux and Aradia are introduced to the Lalonde social circle. Soon Sollux is involved in Lady Lalonde’s alchemical meetings, and she doesn’t seem to mind that he’s a crusty lemon-coated doof.

Rose, who has always had something of a passive-aggressive relationship with her equally brilliant mother, informs you that if she gains a stepparent of alchemical leanings from your introduction, she will hold you accountable. You tell her that Sollux has a sweet mousse filling. She tells you that it is unwise to discuss how people taste and you tell her that there was no need to deliberately misconstrue what you said. She raises a brow, you put your hands on your hips, and like that, despite the months of abbreviated meetings where you were really mostly thinking about Karkat, the two of you are friends again. You can’t wait to introduce her to Karkat.

A few more months pass and then an important threshold is reached, and it’s like free-hugs-holiday _every_ _day_ because as soon as it’s safe, Karkat is all up in your space. You read with your knees or backs touching, you sleep, as often as not, back-to-back, or huddled close, spooning, though never face-to-face, just in case. He’s a sheet stealer, a blanket bandit, a pillow pilferer. You’re not surprised. He winds himself in the sheets until he can barely move, like even asleep, especially asleep, he’s trying to simulate another person hugging him. It makes you hug him harder and also wish Bad Things on The Foreigner.

At the threshold of free-hugs-ville, Sollux pronounced Karkat’s spit and urine to be no more likely to cause itching then the unenhanced versions and left him a glass beaker that could more accurately be called a bucket. Karkat flat out tells him that there’s no way he’s giving up that much blood and Sollux flicks a finger against his nearest horn.

“That, you immature grub, is for a slurry sample, should you ever grow shameglobes. I’m leaving the collection device as I certainly don’t plan to be around when you’re figuring out which end of your bits to dandle.”

Karkat tosses the glass vessel at him with a shout, but even with his back turned, Sollux just halts its flight and zooms it back onto Karkat’s lap, which results in a little dance of I-don’t-want-to-touch-it. It’s pretty funny. He hides it under his bed.

Eventually, Karkat gets medically cleared for general interactions with people outside the house, provisional upon continued blood testing, just to be sure his organs continue to work as they have been.

Sollux tells him not to sex up anyone colder than brown and Karkat asks him if he’s offering. They get into one of their insult fights and you get up to get a glass of water from the kitchen as they seem to have forgotten that they have an audience.

You split a bowl of thankfully-not-chicken-and-carrot soup with Bec, and you read a few chapters of _Fragments of Historical Automata_ , and you work on some plans for automatons that react to outside input.

The problem is size and you’re either going to have to make interchangeable pattern components, or you’re going to have to make them drastically smaller. You approach it at the other end. What if you create an automaton that reacts _strictly_ to user input? Addition, subtraction, basic division and multiplication. It would have to compete with the fastest fingered abacus users to be viable for further development, but it would be _useful_. Once you have the guts figured out you can ornament it any way you want. And what if it also printed the calculations? Maybe an ibis head, like Thoth. With a tiny forked tongue and four tiny horns, like your own awkward rangy stork-troll.

You work your way through several sheets of paper, during which time it’s loud and then it’s still loud, and then it’s quieter and then it’s silent. You gradually notice and surface from your work to wonder if they’ve managed to accidently off one another after all.

You check on them and neither of them is dead, which is good, and they’ve both provided slurry samples, which should help with their tension levels, because you sure do seem to have cornered the market on high-strung troll boys. They’ve also christened your floor with some of their exuberance, which is not good, because troll spunk is probably as hard to get out of wood as troll vomit and troll blood and vomited troll blood. Ugh.

You’ve cleaned Karkat up plenty of times when he was ill, you’ve gone through something like four dozen pairs of thin waterproofed leather gloves, and they’re _not cheap_ , you could have been buying _books_. You could have been buying _supplies_ , you have your _eye_ on a fine set of diamond files in the watchmaker’s district, and the watchmaker’s younger brother has promised to keep them aside for you _just one more month_ several times already.

They can clean up after themselves this time. You tell them as much and Sollux actually _giggles_ at you. Clearly that one’s wound _way_ too tight if this is what an orgasm does to him. You make a mental note to inform Aradia that he clearly needs more proactive maintenance. Either she’ll see to it, one way or another, or he’ll blush full-body golden. Either is an acceptable result as far as you are concerned.

So, Karkat gets cleared to make his way into the wider throng of troll-human-carapacian society and Grandpa introduces him to Lady Lalonde as his ward and Rose snipes at him until he snipes back and he writes _an actual letter_ to The Foreigner to discuss exactly _why_ what he did was shitty and exactly _how_ shitty it was and he _actually gets a letter back_ that is, well, not justification, but a lot of clarification on what the guy _thought_ he was doing, which, as far as you are concerned, was being an unimaginative literal-minded asshat. There is no haberdasher that can disguise it. What crowns his blockhead is not a set of horns.

More letters go back and forth and sometimes Karkat is mollified and sometimes he’s sad or mad or frustrated, but they actually seem to be talking more now that they’re _not_ talking, and it seems to be working, so you can’t really complain.

He writes to Jack now, and doesn’t get replies most of the time, not unless each letter is just a question that can be answered with a parsimonious few words. ‘Did I ever touch you?’ ‘Yes. Brat’. ‘Did you know what you were doing?’ ‘Like Hell.’ ‘Was it ever more than a job? _(Did you ever care?)_ ’ ‘Who taught you your sickles, Brat? _(Yes.)_ ’

Karkat lets you read the letters from both of them and it makes a sad sort of sense.

The Foreigner was at The Sufferer’s execution, was the last hand raised against Him and he regretted it. When he came into possession of a grub of the same color, The Sufferer’s color, he thought he could make amends, raise it safely.

Except your definition of safe, and The Foreigner’s, are very different. You can raise a bird in a box but it’s still less than it should be, even if it’s _safe_. You can fit a grub with a suit of armor, but the weight of it is just as much hindrance as protection. You wonder if this is what happens when trolls live hundreds of years. Was his logic spotty from the beginning, or did it decay with time? How could a stab-happy potty-mouthed carapacian giving a child edged weapons be a better definition of _safe_? And yet it was, the pull and push of muscles the one freedom Karkat had.

For lack of something to do, and for a modest income, (or so he claims, it’s completely just to spend more needling-time together) Karkat starts to work with Sollux, becomes his public-facing assistant, grows and processes plants for him.

He works something out with The Foreigner, and meets him once a month in a public place in exchange for continued access to the garden. You don’t know what they talk about at their meetings. You do know that the first time Karkat touched his hand The Foreigner trembled but did not stop him.

The Foreigner doesn’t seem all that interested in the garden, it sounds like he planted it for Karkat and since Karkat grew enough to care for it, no one else has bothered. Its neatness suffered from his extended absence but nothing appears to have died. Sollux is triumphant over his continued access-by-proxy. He sends Karkat over with lists of plant parts he wants. The lists are the length of his skinny stork arms.

He loans Karkat _books_ , and now you know he’s deadly serious about their kismesissitude. He lays out a schedule and one _completely orchestrated_ argument later (Karkat really needs to learn not to take the bait), Karkat has agreed to attend the first year of Medician’s track at the University. You’ve enrolled in the Artificer’s first year track, and, hemmed between asking The Foreigner for money and owing Sollux, Grandpa solemnly signs a tuition loan over to Karkat. The two of you study together in preparation for term to start in two weeks. It’s like everything is better, and right, or almost. Finally.

*

And then the Atlantic seatrolls send a delegation to the city to discuss trade routes and coal versus petrol versus sail and Karkat gains a very determined, very likely-to-accidently-die-if-he-doesn’t-back-off, suitor.

It seems that, for Cronus Ampora at least, the relative _susceptibility_ of seadwellers refers not only to Karkat’s still-dangerous blood, but also to his _charms_.

The seadweller better back off. You’re really jealous of Karkat’s charms being distracted away from you, at least by complete and utter strangers. Smarmy ones. With more money than sense, and assumptions about how Karkat should just fall into their smarmy arms. Ugh.

He sends Karkat terrible poetry. Phrases like “feel wholly faint in your Holy presence” and “the gifts of your features are the greatest presents” feature prominently. You weigh letting this run its natural course against your irritation, and then you pull up your big girl underthings and actually ask Karkat what he wants to do.

The next time Ampora calls on his would-be-paramour, (three days before term starts, and _you do not have time for this, you need to Science!),_ he gets a bit too close to Karkat’s sigh of frustration and actually does faint, heels over horns, just keels over on the carpet. The posy he brought, all medicinally useless according to Karkat, scatters.

You check his vitals, all fine, Karkat hauls over a trunk and backs off, you line it with pillows, and you dump the seadweller in, bottom first, so all his limbs fit and he doesn’t accidentally suffocate. You close it but don’t latch or lock it, tack a note to the top in four quick taps of your hammer, politely requesting that he no longer call on the Harley residence as it seems to be at odds with his constitution, and you ship him back across the city with a troll driver you know to be a friend of Aradia’s. Clarin won’t listen to him if he wakes up, but she also won’t let any harm come to him. Anyone who tries is likely to get swarmed by rats and pigeons and whatever other animals call the city home.

You tell her to go gently, that Mr. Ampora has a hangover and has chosen to ensconce himself in your luggage, but that he need not return it as he seems to have grown fond of it. Clarin smiles and promises to get him home safely and to make sure that they open the chest promptly so he doesn’t suffer from a lack of ventilation.

You pay her double for her trouble and she clucks to her handsome Hackney mare with the little snip of white on her nose (her name is Bobwhite after a pleasantly plump and curvy New World bird, Bob for short) and the two of them move off at a springy trot that absolutely would not be comfortable to anyone with a hangover.

Back inside, you look at Karkat, he looks at you, and the two of you collapse amid the scattered flora on the carpet and just laugh. He picks up one of the wilted violets and absentmindedly munches on it.

You lean in, and you can smell his breath, warm, alive, the scent of vegetation and the faintest pepper floral scent of the flower, the humdrum smell of spit, the predigestive juices that keep the mouth cavity lubricated. You think about how utterly complex a living organism is and that you want to know how he ticks so you can replicate every bit of him in copper and bronze and steel, wind it up and let it run and then return to him, the original that cannot be truly copied.

You’re breathing each other’s exhales now, and it would not mean something so poignant if he hadn’t had to go through hell to be here.

You lean in further, eyes open and if you’re the one who initiates it, you had only presumed so far as to kiss his cheek at the setting of the dimple he gets when he frowns, or smiles, but let’s be honest, it’s _Karkat_ so one is more likely than the other. It’s Karkat that turns just barely, his eyes also open, so that you meet equally.

*

And if you spend the next few years sharing a bed, often for nothing more than the company and the cuddles and the kissing, and you build a lot along the way and also demolish a few idiotic assertions as to what is ‘ _impossible’_ as he learns physical and herbal and alchemical healing, learns people in groups larger than seven, and if the two of you are never sure if it’s troll-pale or troll-flush, or human-whatever, it _doesn’t really matter_ as long as you are honest with one another.

For the record, it’s both, and maybe you’re greedy, and maybe Karkat’s a troll, but being a troll has never been of any more benefit to him than being a brunette, or right-handed, or preferring chicken to duckmeat. So sometimes troll matrons and patrons frown, fussily, like their wigs pain them or their horns are screwed on too tightly, but Karkat doesn’t much care.

They can put him on a pedestal, but he certainly does his best not to stay there. They can pillory him in public opinion, but again, he doesn’t much care. He is not theirs, he is his own, and when he chooses, yours and Sollux’s. And someday they may ask him for help and he will give it, because he will take the Oath, but that doesn’t mean they’ve won. He is his own. Still stupid. Still pretty. Still fierce and intelligent and stubborn as the Mysteries.

You tell him this. He tells you that you might as well be describing yourself. You punch him in the shoulder, and when he rocks back, lets it rock him back, he pulls you down to the bed with him. You let him.


End file.
